Marlowe (2023)

1939. Bay City/Los Angeles. Morally upright private eye Philip Marlowe (Liam Neeson) is feeling his age quite a bit, but he’s still working a job that involves getting shot at, conked on the head, used by the police and clients to do their dirty work, and so on.

This week – one must not assume but knows this sort of thing happens to Marlowe regularly – ravishing Clare Cavendish (Diane Kruger) hires Marlowe to find her lover Nico Peterson (François Arnaud) who has apparently disappeared without even a goodbye, which simply isn’t a thing that happens to the lady, or so she explains. Marlowe soon enough finds out that Nico is supposed to be dead, his head smashed by a car at the back of a club; eventually his client discloses that she knows about this, but has seen Nico after his supposed death, looking rather chipper for a zombie.

That is of course not the final omission or outright lie Marlowe is going to hear from his client. Cavendish does at least tend to soften her lies and obfuscations by quite a bit of spirited flirting. Other members of the lying persuasion Marlowe encounters in the following days do tend to prefer violence to sweettalk. And, this being Los Angeles in the late 30s, there are a lot of shady people trying to lie to a private eye who is soon up to his eyebrows in liars, killers, pimps and drug pushers – among other charming people. Every single one of them is played by someone like Jessica Lange, Danny Huston or Patrick Muldoon.

Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is based on John Banville, not Raymond Chandler, but the film is very much clued into Chandler’s idea of what the private detective of the hard-boiled model is supposed to be and do, so expect this version of Marlowe to be a knight in somewhat aged armour, manoeuvring the corrupt world of Hollywood and surroundings while doing his utmost not to be corrupt himself and leave a positive footprint, for someone at least.

Jordan as a director is at his most playful here. His approach to the film’s stylized but often incredibly fun dialogue is to emphasize the artificiality of what characters say and how they speak, which fits nicely into a film that does a rather nice job at pretending Spain is Los Angeles. While this certainly isn’t anything to make the friends of naturalism happy, I do find an ironic joy in a film all about characters to whom pretence and lying has become second nature – again, this is set in Hollywood – pretending to take place where it certainly isn’t with a wink and a smile.

It’s the nature of this particular beast that Jordan pays homage to classic noir and hard-boiled material rather a lot, with many a shot that stands in direct dialogue – let’s say, instead of borrowed - with comparable shots in the classics, but also by drenching this material not in black and white, but rather the colours of 90s neo noir. This does put further emphasis on the artificiality of the whole affair, but it’s a kind of artificiality I found engaging throughout – joyful even.